


Remember, Remember

by recoveringrabbit



Series: all great words [7]
Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Bonfire Night, F/M, Future Fic, Kid Fic, Perthshire Cottage, five years on and I am still not over FZZT and think it likely I never will be, fzzt feels, the children are generally for color and vibe and do not permeate the fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-05
Updated: 2018-11-05
Packaged: 2019-08-19 05:44:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,531
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16528523
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/recoveringrabbit/pseuds/recoveringrabbit
Summary: In which a normal night becomes significant, and then back again.[a future fic in which FS talk about the events of FZZT with the benefit of (1) hindsight (2) peace.]





	Remember, Remember

**Author's Note:**

> Guys, I literally remember the moment I started shipping FS—we had just finished burning our Guys, and I got on the phone to my sister and said, "so, FitzSimmons? are they a ship, or...?" That was five years ago tonight—five roller-coaster years both on an AoS front and personally, but the ride has been so worth it. I needed to mark the anniversary some way!
> 
> This fic is for you, if you have been with FS from the beginning.

Everything feels like fall when they drive up their lane, like the picture-perfect autumn of films: deep, inky black skies; the lingering sweetness of Boy Scout hot chocolate on their tongues; the warm full smell of wood smoke clinging to their hair and clothes; the golden-tinted ruby-red of the light through their drapes. Fitz brings the car to a stop, smiling to hear Mops’s high happy yips already coming from the kitchen, and turns to assess the back seat. Even in the near dark Archie’s bright eyes glow back at him.

“Georgie’s sleeping,” he says in a passable imitation of a whisper, “should I wake her up?”

Jemma answers quickly, already unbuckled and halfway out the car. “No, Da will get her. Why don’t you come with me and have a bath?”

“Birthday boys shouldn’t have to have a bath,” Archie says importantly.

“Birthday boys who have been running around a field should,” Jemma says, “but since you’re six now, you can try it without help. Come on, darling; let’s get out of Da’s way.”

Pacified, Archie pops open his seatbelt and hops out of the car, running ahead of Jemma to throw open the door and greet Mops as enthusiastically as she’s greeting him. Fitz waits until they’ve drawn the dog—and noise—further into the house before getting out himself, closing his door gently and opening Georgie’s behind him. She is indeed asleep. Unconscious, really. She doesn’t stir as he carefully maneuvers her arms through the car seat’s restraints, and when he heaves her up into his arms her little head rolls into the crook of his neck and leaves a trail of drool across his shoulder. One for the wash, then, though it would have gone in anyway, with the mustard from her earlier sausage smeared at the hem.

He gingerly makes his way through the kitchen and up the stairs, using his free hand to block her eyes against the light. Behind the bathroom door, Archie is humming something Fitz thinks might be the Mighty Mouse theme song amidst splashes; Jemma has taken up a position on the floor just outside of Archie’s line of sight. She smiles at him and indicates Georgie with her eyebrows. He shakes his head.

“I’ve got her,” he mouths, “she’s been ICEd.”

Jemma nods, going back to whatever she’s reading on her tablet, and he stoops to reach the knob of Georgie’s door. Using the light from the hall, he wakes her just enough to pull off her jumper and jeans before making sure the night-light is plugged in and kissing the top of her head. He’s gathered up her dirty clothes and is about to leave when her little voice pipes up drowsily behind him: “Da? Where’s Velvet?”

A quick scan of the room reveals the rubbed-worn rabbit facedown at the foot of the bed, and he tucks the bunny under her arm and her arm back under the covers. “I love you, Daddy,” she murmurs, and his heart can’t grow any bigger, but he swears it does every time she says that.

“I love you too, baby girl. Sleep well.”

Jemma’s waiting for him outside the door, her hair in damp frizzles around her face. Apparently, Archie couldn’t quite get through his bath without help. “I’ll take those,” she says, holding out her arms for Georgie’s things, “if you’ll go read Archie’s story and explain to him about what makes fireworks go up.”

He passes over the dirty clothes. “Didn’t we do that last Bonfire Night?”

“Oh, yes, but he feels he can understand better now that he’s six.”

“Well, I’ll _try_ ,” he says skeptically, “though I’m not sure I can without visual aids.”

“Bottle rockets for Christmas, perhaps?”

She disappears into the bathroom to put the clothes in the hamper and he goes into Archie’s room to find his son bouncing on the bed. The combination of night air, cocoa, and birthday glee has Archie spinning brighter than a Catherine wheel, and he requires two stories before he can even almost pay attention to Fitz’s explanation of potassium nitrate and the physics of exhaust fumes. Educational duty discharged, Fitz kisses Archie’s forehead. “It’s time to sleep now. You’ve got school tomorrow.”

Still wriggling, Archie tosses his stuffed dog into the air and says “BOOM” thoughtfully. “But what makes the colours?”

“Chemistry,” Fitz says, catching Doggo and holding him firmly. “It’s different metal salts that burn different colours. Archie, did you hear me? It’s time to settle down.”

Archie lunges for Doggo and starts swinging him around by one long ear. “How can a metal be a salt?”

“It’s not metal like you’re thinking, or salt like you’re thinking either, actually.”

“Can Mama tell me?”

“Of course,” Fitz says, “but not tonight. You’ve already stayed up way past your bedtime.”

“But I’m not _tired_.”

He looks at the clock, then at his son’s eyes. Though Archie’s body looks like he could go for another three hours without stopping there are heavy creases in the corners and the smooth skin under his eyes, and Fitz is fully aware that sugar and excitement don’t offer endless energy. “I tell you what,” he says finally, “if you promise me on Polaris that you’ll lay quietly and not get out from under your covers, you can read your constellation encyclopedia for a few minutes.”

Archie gives one last wiggle, then sets Doggo beside him and nods seriously. “I promise on Polaris. Thank you, Da.”

He gives Archie the book and another kiss. “Happy birthday, son. Love you—”

“—more than monkeys!” Archie finishes in unison, head down in the Pleiades already.

He leaves the door open a crack, as they always do, and goes down the hall already pulling his jumper over his head.

“Oh good, we’ve got the same idea.”

The mental equivalent of an exclamation mark goes off in his head, but when he manages to extricate himself, he finds Jemma coming from the bathroom already in her polka-dot pajamas, her hair curling damply over her shoulders. “Er, what idea’s that?”

“A load of wash,” she says briskly, “to keep everything from smelling like smoke for a week. I’ve had a shower to get it out of my hair, but I’m not sure I’ve succeeded.”

He drops his jumper to the floor and snags her as she passes, burying his nose in her wet hair. “You smell all right to me. Intoxicating, really.”

Her smile is a familiar shape against his neck. “I think you’d tell me that regardless.”

“No. I can think of several situations where ‘intoxicating’ is not the first word I’d use.”

“Oh really. Such as...”

“Well...” He takes a moment to pull her closer, breathing deeply of her shampoo and the lingering smoke and the scent that means _Jemma_ , wherever in the universe they are. “Do you remember that episode with Eleven and Amy Pond where they end up in the belly of the beast covered in sick?”

She laughs, ducking her head into his shoulder. “As though you’d get anywhere near me if I was covered in sick.”

“No fair,” he says, “I’ve done it before. We do have children.”

“You have,” she agrees, and pulls away. “I’d like to get the load in before it gets too late so we can put it in the dryer before we go to bed. Could I have your clothes?”

“Anytime you like,” he says obediently, and she laughs again as he stoops to pick up his jumper. “Think I’ll take a shower too. And then I need to eat something else. One sausage in a roll and a cup of rubbish cocoa isn’t going to last me much longer.”

“I didn’t expect it would. Egg on toast?”

“With mushrooms?” he asks hopefully.

“And other vegetables.”

He showers quickly and lugs the hamper downstairs, shoving the jeans and jumpers and socks into the washer while Jemma sautés the veg in a bit of oil and wine and tries to poach some eggs. She fails—she always does, a fault he can’t explain that only makes her more perfect—and scrambles some instead, piling them with the veg on the toast he’s buttered and carrying the plates to the table. He follows with their tea. “You’re on to explain metal salts tomorrow,” he says as they sit.

Her eyes light up. “How fun! We can burn things in the lab. Georgie will like that too.”

“I never thought,” he says, loading up his fork, “I would ever see you more excited than you were cutting into an actual alien, but you continually prove Past Me wrong.”

“I can’t let you always be right.” Her eyebrows flash together and she sets down her mug, a clear sign she’s thought of something urgent. “Oh, but, I think perhaps _neither_ of us was right today. I had an idea while you were doing the school run—what if we can get ahold of some cavorite—”

“Cavorite? Wouldn’t that be like walking around with a—”

“Not if we could coat it in adamantine—”

“Sure, but what’s the likelihood—”

“Oh, that’s surely not worth—”

“Am I going to have to be the practical one here? We’re trying to make this cost effective.”

“Eventually,” she says, eyes bright, “but couldn’t we run simulations using cavorite? That would at least let us know if it’s worth bothering about. We can always try to find a synthetic method once we know it works.”

“Tomorrow,” he agrees, because he has learned in their twenty years together that it is never wise to dismiss one of her ideas out of hand, and because he thinks she could actually be on to something. He pushes the idea to the back of his mind to let it brew, then takes another bite. “Were you reading the reports from Oslo while Archie was in his bath?”

“No, a question from Suzuki. Mack is thinking with his mechanic brain again; she just needed to know if there was a biological workaround. I’ve answered it already.”

“Anything exciting?”

“Oh, well. What’s exciting?”

“First Year is having a Christmas program. Can’t think of anything more exciting than that.”

They finish their dinner speaking of the usual things—their work, their children, the news, the house—and wash up together as Mops snores quietly under the table. It’s as easy and comfortable as the old maroon cardigan he’s wearing, as familiar as his favorite slippers. They’ve lived a thousand nights like this and if he has anything to say about it they’ll live a hundred thousand more. Once, he might’ve asked Jemma if she was happy, but they’ve been here long enough that he doesn’t have to ask. He can see it in the way she hums as she scrubs the dishes, the looseness of her ponytail, the soft slope of her shoulders and stillness in her hands. Not only is she happy, but she’s content. Domesticity, he thinks as they settle on the sofa to watch last night’s _Strictly_ , is truly underrated. Nights like this, he half-forgets they ever had another life.

“Fitz?”

He turns his head slightly, just so he can see her out of the corner of his left eye. She’s taken her hair from the ponytail and the way it hangs over her shoulders reminds him of when they used to watch telly together at SciOps. “Mm?”

“Do you know what today is?”

“Is this a trick question? As our son reminded us something like a thousand times today, it’s his birthday. Which means it’s the fifth of November.”

“Yes,” she says, rolling her eyes, “but it’s something else—no, _not_ Bonfire Night.”

He tries to imagine their kitchen calendar and comes up blank, then scrolls through his mental diary. “The Mars Orbiter Mission launched in 2013?” he offers finally, and she rolls her eyes again.

“Why in the world—”

“Well, how am I—”

“—of all the interplanetary missions—”

“—of all of human history—”

“—a bit closer to home.”

“Closer to home,” he says, “so, in our history? No, I don’t. What’s today?”

She picks up the remote control to mute the television, turning it over in her hands without seeing it. “Today’s the day we discovered the antiserum for the Chitauri virus.”

Even all these years later, even as gently as she says it, even with her sitting alive and well beside him, the thought of that day stops his heart in his chest. For a long time he had nightmares of her falling away from him, her body floating somewhere between sky and sea, him plunging after her but unable to catch up. He has worse memories now, but that was the first. He hears his breath noisy in the sudden silence, and Jemma’s hands leave the remote to find and grip his left hand. “Do you know the anniversaries of all the times we cheated death, then?” he’s able to ask, shakily, and she leans forwards to rest her forehead against his temple.

“I’m sorry, Fitz. I didn’t mean to startle you so. No, I don’t remember them. I try to forget them, honestly. I was just looking through my Bus journals today because I thought I remembered the thing about cavorite, and I happened across it.”

“You wrote about nearly dying?”

“No,” she says again. “I wrote about the first death. I wrote about that poor fireman. And then I didn’t write again for a few days. But of course one can’t...quite...forget something like that.”

“No,” he agrees, shaking his head to clear the memory and failing. “Are _you_ all right?”

“I am.” She nods, then nods again when he looks at her skeptically. “Truly, Fitz. That’s why I mentioned it in the first place. It was such a terrible, terrible thing—the first of many—and yet, on that same day five years later, you and I were together and well and happy, becoming _parents_. And here we are six years later still, and we’d never remember today was anything else. That seems to me to be something worth celebrating.”

“Eleven years ago today?”

“Well”—she smiles—“give or take some time zones. It’s a bit confusing in there.”

Her thumbs haven’t stopped their habitual paths along his muscles and tendons, and her hair is still wet enough that the smell of it wafts over him. He looks down at their knees, pressed together though they have the whole sofa to spread out on, and thinks about how this day, eleven years ago, was the first day in his life he realized he wouldn’t want to live it without Jemma Simmons. He tends to think of his life as split in two—before her and after her—but if he’s honest with himself the _after Jemma_ has its own division: before he knew he loved her more than his own life, and after. It’s odd, knowing he can now precisely date the moment his life changed forever. Odder still that it necessarily precedes another, equally life-changing moment of the same date.

“It struck me as funny,” she says after a minute, “that those two things happened on the same day. You realizing, and Archie being born. If the first hadn’t happened, perhaps the second wouldn’t have either.”

Of course she knows what he’s thinking—she doesn’t always, but they’ve had something like this conversation before. Sometimes they have it when they’re gleeful, celebrating how far they’ve come together; sometimes they have it when they’re overwhelmed by their scars, reminding each other that they’re together despite everything that’s come at them. He turns his hand in hers to twine their fingers together. “It still would.”

“Do you think?”

“I know,” he says. The Chitauri virus was the first time, but it wouldn’t have been the only one. It could have been that grenade on the train, or at the coup at the Hub, or—well, take your pick, there were a hundred times he almost lost her forever. “Sooner or later, I would have had to think about trying to live without you, and that would have been the beginning.”

“And everything would have happened just the same?” Her one raised eyebrow betrays her disbelief, and he has to agree.

“It’s not so straightforward as all that, and you know it.”

“I do,” she says. “But you and I are straightforward, so I suppose you’re right.”

“Effortless.” He’s breathing normally without thinking about it, then a goner again when she laughs and leans forward to kiss him.

“Well, not _quite_ that. But always worth what effort we put in.”

He kisses her back with one hand in her hair, savouring it. “But it _was_ the time I realised,” he murmurs, “so it was important. You’ll never know how much I hate that Ward was the one who saved you.”

“ _You’re_ the one who saved me,” she says, as she always has.

“I would have really liked to be able to snatch you from the air. Maybe that would have drastically changed the course of our relationship—you could have seen how daring and suave I am right up front and fallen in love with me straight away.”

“I didn’t fall in love with you for being suave and daring—though you are, of course you are—I fell in love with you for being by my side then and always.”

“So it’s just because you’re used to me. I see.”

“Ugh, Fitz!” She kisses him again to counteract his smirk—which was, naturally, his goal—and he catches her with no intent of letting go. Her mouth is familiar, the taste of it, the shape of it, and the very truth of its familiarity makes it new in a way he can’t explain. Though kissing his wife doesn’t leave him a lot of attention for anything else, he has just enough mind to feel sympathy for the hapless Fitz of eleven years ago, who had no idea that the uncomfortable, awkward feelings overwhelming his gut would lead him here. _Hang in there, buddy_ , he sends out into the universe, then pulls Jemma more firmly into his lap and doesn’t think about anything other than her.

When her hair is entirely disheveled and he’s lost his breath for much more enjoyable reasons, she takes his face between her hands meets his eyes firmly, all steady determination that means she’s about to say something very important. “Yes, maybe you couldn’t snatch me out of the air with a parachute, but you caught me that day and all the days I’ve known you. You have always been the hero.”

“Your hero,” he says.

“Yes,” she agrees, “that too.”

He waits until she knows he has heard both what she said and what she meant, their eyes having one of those long conversations they can never put into words, his heart knowing that somehow, inexplicably, she will look into it and see all the love and gratitude a man can feel neatly typed up into dissertations and filed in a hundred cabinets marked with her name. Then, reaching around her, he finds the remote and turns off the television. “As hero, I suppose it’s my duty and privilege to bathe our daughter in the morning? They won’t let her into nursery as caked in dirt as she is now.”

“Since we share the saving duties in this house, I’m willing to roshambo you for it.”

“Nah,” he says, “unless you’re both up early, don’t bother. You can go out to the lab and start inputting the data for the simulations?”

“A just division of labour. Oh, Fitz, whoever takes them to school in the morning needs to remember we’ve got to pay a fine at the library and pick up some other books, and we’re out of milk. Archie wanted to pour his own yesterday and I’m afraid it didn’t go very well.”

Such an ordinary thing, to be out of milk—the sort of thing that might happen to anybody. Exactly the sort of thing that does happen to everybody, happening to him, now: Leopold Fitz-Simmons, husband and father and dog owner, someone who might never have lived on a plane or visited another galaxy or spent months in cryosleep waiting to save and be saved, is out of milk. And all this because on this day eleven years ago he had refused to imagine a life without his best friend, and they had fixed it together.

“Fitz?”

He looks back at her—a little older than she was then, a little wiser, a few more scars. Her eyebrows are drawn together in the same old way, though, and anything that’s changed within her has only made him love her more. “Nothing,” he says, “only, it’s a nice little life we’ve got now, isn’t it?”

She understands. He knew she would. “Yes. I’m very glad it’s ours. Thank you.”

Then she bends down and kisses his cheek sweetly, chastely, as she did all those years ago. But this time, instead of leaving him to clutch confusedly at a pillow, she wraps her arms around him with confidence born of long custom, and he wraps his arms around her, and she stays.


End file.
